A lot of these are not so much "What if this modern thing was made in the 90s" so much as "What if this modern thing was designed by 90s era Anime mechanical designers"

I'm not saying that's bad, it's actually awesome and I love all these designs, it's just they're less about what things actually looked like in the 90s as what people thought looked cool in the 90s.posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 9:32 AM on September 11 [8 favorites]

it's just they're less about what things actually looked like in the 90s

I'm pretty sure I had a Discman that had the same exact design aesthetic as the proposed 90s iPhone.posted by explosion at 10:36 AM on September 11

One thing that will always make me mad is that we never got the widespread MiniDisc adoption promised by anime c/o Sony's obstinance. Now? That day is done. Storage based on physical mechanisms have had their day and the sun has set. Solid state is king everywhere and anything else, even holographic storage, is why bother at this stage. Blu-ray is just an esoteric format that gives a digital code while maintaining physical ownership of something. Rust on platters may as well be an endangered species.

Solid state basically has unlimited storage on a postage stamp for less than the price of a box of MiniDiscs back in the day. A couple of months back I bought a 400GB card for my Switch (the only thing I need a high capacity SD card for) for $80. 400GB on a fingernail for less than than a benjamin. The world is god damned amazing.posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 10:41 AM on September 11 [3 favorites]

Regarding this, a Japanese classmate in high school had a teeny tiny handheld computer with a full ascii keyboard and some absurdly small amount of volatile storage. It had a backlit dot-matrix LCD screen that showed maybe three lines of code and side scrolled to reach the end of lines. I would guess maybe it could show like 25-30 characters across.

The idea was that you would hand-enter your BASIC program. I'm sure there must have been SOME mechanism for getting data into the thing that did not involve hunt-and-pecking the teeny tiny keys, but I don't know what it was.

The specific feature I wonder if I recall correctly was a tiny heat-paper printer, very much like our modern receipt printers, either incorporated directly into the gadget or made as a snap-on accessory much as seen in the artist's ill here, apparently so that you could print out your code to check for bugs. It was amazing. It couldn't have had a real purpose other than to provide some manufacturer with bragging rights. I can't even begin to speculate how expensive it must have been. I can't recall offhand who made it but want to say Casio or Toshiba. The unit was the size of a medium candy bar, like 20cm x 6cm x 2 cm.posted by mwhybark at 10:59 AM on September 11 [4 favorites]

It does appear Casio made units such as I describe, both with and without integrated printers.posted by mwhybark at 11:09 AM on September 11 [1 favorite]

These are cool, and make me wish I could buy a rugged case for my iPhone that looks like a Sony Sports Walkman from the 90s.

But the high-performance unicycle is a real thing that, in the real world, is more high-performance than what his drawing imagines, since the real ones are mountain unicycles with a disc brake.posted by The World Famous at 11:15 AM on September 11 [1 favorite]

The public twitter terminal has a screen that looks like they just bolted an iphone to it, and for some reason I love that.posted by Mister Moofoo at 11:41 AM on September 11

Why that looks like a sleeker version of the Apple QuickTake, which asked the question "what if we made a digital camera that could hold a whopping eight 640×480 images and made it the form factor of a hardcover book for some reason?" Hey, it was still more convenient than taking and scanning a Polaroid. 1994 was great!

And because brands never die, what is Apple calling their new feature to quickly swap into video mode? QuickTake.posted by zachlipton at 12:50 PM on September 11

Some versions of the Sony Clié (a Sony-produced Palmpilot) looked a fair bit like this guy's retrofuture iPhone.

Those things were amazing. They had regular Dragonball CPUs at first but they also had a secondary DSP that did all of the media decoding. I wanted one so badly as a teenager.posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 12:51 PM on September 11 [2 favorites]

mwhybark, are you sure you aren't describing the TRS-80 Pocket Computer or its equivalent the Sharp PC-1211 ? It is like an overgrown calculator with a one line screen that was programmed in BASIC, and came out in 1980. I had one at work for a while. It had a printer and a tiny plotter too.posted by rfs at 1:17 PM on September 11

That iPhone is almost an exact copy of a portable media and game emulator device that I found in Sweden. It ran off of AAA batteries and you loaded everything off of an SD card. I loved it.posted by Young Kullervo at 3:48 PM on September 11 [2 favorites]

mwhybark, are you sure you aren't describing the TRS-80 Pocket Computer or its equivalent the Sharp PC-1211 ?

Absolutely. My highschool was overseas, and my Japanese classmate and I did not share a language, at first, except high nerdery. His device was almost certainly for the Japanese market, and there were quite a number of equivalent devices by Japanese manufacturers including Toshiba and Casio.posted by mwhybark at 6:12 PM on September 11

The “portable social media terminal” is like the Sidekick I had when I was but a young man!posted by thedaniel at 10:49 PM on September 11 [1 favorite]

I had one of Casio microcomputers running BASIC with the three line display, printer, and tiny keyboard. It was a status symbol thing a rich uncle bought for himself then realized that neither he nor his kids ever used it, so it was dumped on me.

It was pretty useless, but it was a "real" computer that was smaller than a transistor radio. Ate batteries.

I've owned (sometimes multiple, sometimes for parts) second hand PEG-NR70/v, PEG-NX60/70/v, PEG-SJ22s and a PEG-NZ90 briefly before it was stolen. Otherwise, I ran them into the ground and swapped parts around when necessary.

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